If your banana bread ever comes out great except it's too brown on the outside edges . . . after bread has cooled, place it in a ziplock bag and refrigerate overnight -- it will be evenly moist in the morning, no more "hard crust."

My go-to banana bread recipe is in the Joy of Cooking - the edition before the current one. It makes the highest loaf I've ever seen - moist and cakey, not small, dark or dense. I like walnuts, so I make it with nuts. After it's cooled, a slice toasted with butter is ... a religious experience. Cheers.

I use freshed ground flour...wheat or spelt. Instead of white sugar, I use sucanat...it adds a fabulous maple flavor! I always double the recipe and use 3 cups of mashed bananas for 2 loaves. I just bake an hour or a little more...until a toothpick comes out clean. I use non-stick spray for the pan.

I made this recipe x 6, but in 5 loaf pans. The bread rose to nice rounded tops.

While I blended ingredients together for all 6 loaves, I added the ingredients one loaf at a time (i.e., recipe calls for 1 tsp of salt, I added 6 x 1 tsp of salt rather than 2 Tbls.)

The only variations I used in this recipe are:

1) I like the cooked flavor of vanilla so I added an extra 2 tsps for a total of 8 tsps of vanilla.

2) I like both walnuts and chocolate chips so I added equal 1/2 cups of chocolate chips for a total of 1 cup of nuts/chips; and

3) after chopping the nuts there was a fair amount of fine, almost powdery, chopped nuts at the bottom of the bowl, I chopped the remainder of the chocolate chips to about the same fineness, added about 1/3 cup of sugar, mixed them all together and sprinkled it on the top of the loaves before baking. It makes a nice look and a bit of a crunch to the tops.

This was some of the very best banana bread I've ever made! It tastes wonderfully and is perfectly moist/dense. The recipe says bake for 55 mins. @ 350. It took approximately 1 1/4 hours to bake. I surmise that the discrepancy in the time is due to the amount of batter in the loaf pans. I baked 4 loaves in the oven at once then the final loaf by itself; either way it took approximately 1 1/4 hours.

I baked my banana bread for about 52 minutes at 350. It was a little overbaked, in my opinion - when I inserted the toothpick at 52 minutes, it came out clean. Next time I'll guard it more carefully. The flavor is fantastic though. I love eating it cold with cream cheese.

A year ago I made a delicious banana loaf, where I mashed the banana until smooth for the recipe, But recently saw a recipe where you chop the banana into chunks then fold into bread mixture... once baked and cooled, when I sliced it open , I noticed that the banana patched in the loaf were purple !! Does anyone know if this is a normal reaction? I immediatley baked a second loaf to see if I had perhaps done something wrong, but the same thing happened!
It still tastes good though. Can anyone shed a little light on my confusion?

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I have made a couple of banana loafs with golden syrup & a sliced banana in the bottom & found using ripe bananas are fine but the greener the banana the more pinky/purple the banana goes something to do with the sugars & the potassium in the unripe banana.
Has anyone else found the same?

My college roommate discovered this recipe back in 2006, and it graced our kitchen table one stress-filled Tuesday. For some reason, it was baked the next several weeks on Tuesday, and became somewhat of a tradition (still is!) amongst ourselves and several other friends. We've tried various recipes over the years, but this is the one we always come back to. I've made this countless times for guests and to bring to gatherings, and I'm continually asked "where'd you get the recipe?!" My only alternation - chocolate chips instead of walnuts. Thanks for such a great recipe!!